No. 2 - So what is actually happening in the journalism industry anyways?

It seems that almost every time I tell somebody that I am going to school to study journalism that their reaction was doubt. Over the summer I had a dental assistant who asked me if the newspaper I was interning at was cutting a lot of jobs because she didn’t know anyone who read a physical paper.

“Does anyone read the paper? Everyone just gets their news from online,” she said.

I wanted to let her know that the paper does in fact have a website, and that even if people are getting their news online, that they could be getting it from those sites, which means that they aren’t going away. After basic conversations about the state of newsrooms in some of my lower level journalism courses, I was feeling more optimistic about how the journalism industry is adapting to operating in an age with the internet.

However, it appears that the industry as a whole is experiencing more layoffs and that newspapers in particular are taking the hardest hit.

While sometimes I feel that this issue is a more recent development, the job loss and revenue loss in the news industry has been occurring for almost 40 years. I had not really thought about that, but that point was brought up in a forum about the decline of journalism and the implications for the community of Springfield, Illinois. While the internet has played a large role in decreasing the value of advertisements, I did not think about the decline in revenue from classified ads after the growth of sites like Craigslist, which was a point made by one of the panelists at minute 33.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFlLBDsQGOo

I had been hoping that legacy news outlets that had been creating more online content would see a slowing in job loss, and statistics about some news outlets seeing a surge in subscriptions and readership in 2016 seemed to reassure that it might be a possibility of job loss to be reduced. Clearly the article by Bloomberg points to a different conclusion.

I also spent a lot of time reading articles about different media that have been emerging, and I was hopeful that sites like Buzzfeed would bring change to the news media industry and lead the way in adapting to the new culture. Layoffs at Buzzfeed made me worried because that made it seem like new online based news organizations still were not able to find what would work in the new environment.

However, a recent fact sheet published by Pew Research Center about digital news sources shows that revenues, employment and viewership have been on the rise since 2011.

This provided me with hope that maybe some sort of solution to funding journalism and maintaining readership can be achieved.

I think it will also be interesting to see what solutions legacy media put in place that will work towards maintaining their business. Over the summer, I was able to see a lot of very interesting changes because the paper I did my internship was in the process of switching ownership. I will examine more in depth the changes that I saw in the newsroom in my coming blog posts.